Project Management & Quarto

STAT 551

R Projects!

Self contained
Flag where R should look for files
Allow for us to easily use here() to find files
Should be how you work in RStudio every time

Why use `here()` to read in your data?

Never set a relative / full path or change your working directory!!!

setwd("/Users/atheobol/Documents/Teaching/Stat 551/")

Working in R? Rendering a document? here() uses the same path to load in data!

Your turn!

Open RStudio
Choose “File” and “New Project”

If you already made a STAT 551 folder

Choose “Existing Directory”.
Browse to where your STAT 551 folder lives
Click “Create Project”

If you have not already made a STAT 551 folder

Choose “New Directory”.
Type what name you want your folder to have.
Browse to where you want your folder to live (e.g., Documents).
Click “Create Project”

Quarto

Why use Quarto?

Quarto unifies and extends
the R Markdown ecosystem

unifies for people who love R Markdown

extends for people who don’t know R Markdown

The R Markdown ecosystem

Quarto: Next generation R Markdown

Quarto logo.

Quarto highlights

One quadrant of the Quarto logo. Consistent implementation of attractive and handy features across outputs: tabsets, code-folding, syntax highlighting, etc.

Two quadrants of the Quarto logo. More accessible defaults as well as better support for accessibility

Three quadrants of the Quarto logo. Guardrails, particularly helpful for new learners: YAML completion, informative syntax errors, etc.

Four quadrants of the Quarto logo. Support for other languages like Python, Julia, Observable, and more via Jupyter engine for executable code chunks.

Some highlights of these improvements include

–> consistent implementation of attractive and handy features across all outputs, like tabsets, code-folding, and syntax highlighting,

–> more accessible defaults as well as better support for creating accessible documents,

–> guardrails that are particularly helpful for new learners, like YAML completion and informative syntax errors,

–> and perhaps most excitingly for those who are not coming from the R ecosystem, Quarto offers support for other languages like Python, Julia, Observable, and more via the Jupyter engine for executable code chunks. And it’s designed to be expandable to more engines and languages, even those that might not exist today.

[pause] So by now I’m assuming many of you have already started playing with Quarto, or you’re waiting for me to do that. So, let’s dive in and see what all the Quarto fuss is about!

Quarto CLI orchestrates each step of rendering

Quarto makes moving between formats straightforward

Document

lesson-1.qmd

title: "Lesson 1"
format: html

Presentation

lesson-1.qmd

title: "Lesson 1"
format: revealjs

Website

_quarto.yml

project:
  type: website

website: 
  navbar: 
    left:
      - lesson-1.qmd

What did spark my interest was how how straightforward it is with Quarto to move between output formats.

As an educator, two things are of utmost importance to me about the tools I use to create my materials: reproducibility and ease of transition between output formats, like documents to slides to websites to books.

Over the last year of using Quarto for pretty much everything, I’ve felt like I’ve finally found the tool that lets me go from one output type to the other with minimal, if any, futzing around with my source code beyond the yaml. For example, here are common things I produce

–> a lesson in document form
–> the same content in presentation form
–> the same content on a page in a website,

and you can see that all that needed to change going between these formats is a few lines in the yaml. Nothing in the content part of my document. No slide breaks to remove, no citation style to change, no headings to re-level. This ease of transition has freed up time to focus my time on content, and that, folks, is the dream!

Welcome to Quarto!

Components of a Quarto

Formatting the text in your document

Markdown is a markup language. This means special symbols and formatting to pretty documents.

*text* – makes italics

**text** – makes bold text

# – makes headers

![ ]( ) – includes images or HTML links

< > – embeds URLs

R code options

The Hash Pipe

#|

Rendering your document

Let’s try it!